1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, an image processing method, an image processing program, and a medium recording the image processing program.
2. Description of Related Art
As there has been an improvement in performance of ink jet printers and digital cameras in recent years, it has become possible at home to produce printouts having the quality equivalent to that of silver halide films. A printout here concerns digital images. Since digital images can be easily retouched, it is a common practice to apply various modifications to the digital images for improving the image quality by using photo retouch software, a printer driver, and the like. Since the retouching requires some experience, however, various automatic retouch features are provided.
Since digital images can be easily retouched, it is possible to apply, e.g., lightness correction to an image captured under a backlight condition and modify the image as if it were a non-backlight image. In terms of automated retouching, it is necessary to determine before retouching whether the image to be retouched is a backlight image or a non-backlight image. A conventional image processing apparatus makes this determination by extracting feature quantity of the image and analyzing the feature quantity.
When the lightness correction is automatically applied for backlight image, proper lightness correction is unavailable if a determination is unsuccessfully made whether or not an image to be retouched is a backlight image.